56 In operation | GPA Seabots SB 100 from port operators for an uncrewed oil and debris collection solution that could operate completely autonomously, without needing human employees to perform any of its pre or post-cleaning maintenance. At the moment, the Harbot exists only in a prototyped and demonstrated form, officially it is still “in development” and not yet offered commercially (nor are its specifications available), as the two SB 100s are, but it remains a focal point for GPA Seabots’ r&d. Deployment logistics The decision to design and develop the two SB 100s as small vehicles was driven by requests among customers for something that would be easy to deploy. In addition to harbours having internal and external zones, port authorities and related operators will sometimes have estuaries or lagoons they need cleaned and surveyed. Engineering the USVs to be deployable by an individual and transportable between job locations using a small road vehicle was therefore an early target. “It’s just as important to have the robot work autonomously though,” Barchino says. “Small size and autonomy make customers’ lives easier, as does making the USVs battery-powered. We reduce customers’ operating costs by around 80% by not needing fuel, cranes or hands-on remote control, as larger or less autonomous USVs might. “Logistics contributes massively to the cost barrier of adopting and using uncrewed vehicles. Imagine having to move a 10 m-long USV over 100 km from a harbour warehouse to a lagoon once a week and you get an idea of why some harbour owners still hesitate to use uncrewed systems – something like that can cost €1000 per road journey alone. “With our systems, they can just drive the SB 100 to the launch point, drop it in the water and program its waypoints. The USV then cleans or surveys autonomously while the operator just monitors it, and then the customer lifts it from the water at its predefined mission endpoint, loads it into the vehicle and drives it home.” The typical set-up for oil cleaning uses two plastic booms extending forwards from the Cleaner in a V-shape, with plastic ‘container’ floats – solid objects that shepherd and contain the oil in the space between them – fastened along the lengths of the booms. Their tips extend about 1.5 m apart from one another at the frontal, furthest point of their reach. “Having the arms reaching outwards like that means we can scoop and contain puddles of oil from the surface instead of just splitting and pushing them away,” Barchino explains. “That works for most spills in ports or marinas, which typically occur from things like when repair personnel working on yachts accidentally knock tins of chemicals into the water. But if there’s a larger spill, we can arrange the equipment differently, for instance spreading the absorbers in a wider fan, using more absorbers on a USV at once, or using more than one USV in a group, mesh or swarm formation to cover a wider diameter of oil.” The litter basket is typically also placed between the catamaran hulls, with one to three absorber towels installed inside it. The containers can therefore catch wider patches of oil and funnel them into a more narrow shape, while the USV navigates into that narrowed patch so that the oil can be caught and suspended in the absorbers. An extra container can be wrapped around the back of the basket for catching and containing any droplets that are not absorbed. December/January 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology As standard, an SB 100 Cleaner has two ‘container’ arms for pushing and funnelling oil as well as litter into a centrally mounted basket and towel Harbour authorities also prize data-gathering, including 3D underwater maps of their ports and water sampling tools (as shown here) to assess conditions for biodiversity
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